Letter to the Editor

I am writing to you with regards the review which appeared in your recent publication, written by Mr. Redmond Gore, of the thoroughly unattractive painting Naked Abandonment by Antoine De Clare. I do not wish to tar the mental capacities of Mr. Gore, as I have perused some rather edifying pieces by him in the past; however I am moved to question the stability of someone who could look at such a painting and come away from it with any feeling other than that of abject indignity. I wish not to be censorious, and am in favour of genuine expression in the arts, but in some cases, and in this case especially, I feel I would not be offended in the slightest if someone should walk into the National Gallery today and take a blade to this shallow canvas. Mr. De Clare has a very twisted view of our current society, one he imagines Godless and depraved. Who is this man to speak on our predicament anyway? Is he an Irishman at all? Such a queer-sounding name on him. Granted, we have seen rather unpleasant times recently, what with unemployment and the economic crisis but I would like to invite Mr. De Clare to walk with me along Lower Gardiner Street and view for himself some of the inner city’s undervalued men. He shall see that they are not naked for a start and writhing in pools of mud as depicted in his shocking work of pornography. He shall see that although yes they might be rather pathetic wretches, and you will certainly see some reprobates and unwashed ingrates among them, they are positively not as one sees them presented in his scurrilous ‘art’. They are humans. Pitiful humans, yes, but not the monstrous creatures he appears to see. Yes, I have witnessed some with misshapen heads, but in De Clare’s work, the distortions are catastrophically exaggerated and completely severed from reality. I object wholeheartedly to the representation of the weakest and most worthless in our society as not more than grovelling beasts. Our artworks must strive to do more than that. Those in the modernist project need now to rescind the ugly and revisit grace and general decency.